Hello everyone!

I hope winter is not too terrible where you are, unless you are in Australia and it is summer!

I have been working on restocking my ATCs after a lot of trading through the fall and have been experimenting with some Manga style cartoon portraits for Anime Central 2015. The rough paper did not look too good with the coloured pencils, so I tried blending the pencils with mineral oil (baby oil). I did a more detailed write up about the process on my WordPress blog here:

shellielewis.wordpress.com/2015/02/10/how-to-blend-colored-pencils-with-baby-oil/

If you never tried this process before, give it a shot. It has a nice painterly effect, was easy to execute and fun!

Before blending:





After Blending:




Check this out to give a new dimension to coloured pencil art.





I'm thinking of doing a group swap for Halloween with a "Monsters and Magic" theme for this group. My ideas right now are:

◙ Hand-drawn, hand-painted only with artist grade materials.

◙ Have a rating system for what you want to receive such as (1) keep it cute, (2) traditional monsters, Universal Studios classics etc. preferred, (3) I won't faint at a drop of blood (4) a little gruesome is okay, and, (5) shove your hand in a blender, go on, you can't scare me!!

◙ This will be a curated swap. If anyone wants to join, it will be based on receiving approval after reviewing prior work. Beginner artists and novice ATC traders would not be a good fit for this swap. Experienced artists and traders will not need to worry about getting a stick figure with fangs when they sent out wonderfully made cards.

◙ USA only or international? Thoughts?

I am open to the number of cards made, maybe a 3:3 would be good for the short turn around time if we get this swap going.

I shut down trading about November 15th now. Last year from mid-November to Jan. 5th I had 17 mail art pieces and artist trading card swaps disappear. They never got to me. Some of the ATC swaps I got were slit open. I believe there are a lot of temporary workers in the Chicago mail system over the holidays and they are stealing. It seems they are hoping for money cards / gift cards being sent for Hannukah and Christmas.

Going forward, I am taking a break on trading well before Thanksgiving and waiting until well after New Year to start up again. So if we turn this trade around it will be mailed in October. I am thinking if I send the 3rd week of October, USA traders will get their cards close to Halloween. Let me know if you are interested in the comments below.


I discovered that galleries on ATCsForAll.com are limited! I had been archiving traded cards on the site and that was working out fine, until I hit whatever numerical or memory-based limited there is for users and could not upload any new ATCs available for trade. What to do, what to do? I settled for deleting older work and any collage cards.

Flickr was my previous go to for an online archive. It is nice to be able to show people prior work if you are working on a trade for a custom card. ATCs you made grouped together show your skill level and may offer ideas if the person is not decided on what to request. I was about to get a paid account for Flickr, since I hit the limit on uploads for the free account. Then Flickr did the massive, messy new Web 2.0 design of scrolling tiled thumbnails. My primary problems are that it is a visually cluttered design and the new design jams my slow speed internet connection. I wound up bailing on Flickr and leaving whatever art I had uploaded there alone.  

Maybe I should have been putting my ATCs up on my WordPress blog. It just seemed that I do too many and that ATCs are only one facet of the blog. A group of ATCs seem nice from time to time. Putting every single one up that I make would be boring and repetitive. They could maybe fill their own blog but I have enough blogs to write and make images for right now. I don't want to add another blog to my blogroll.

Unless Google wants to throw a nice big server my way, I'm out of ideas for archiving online. I use dA as a community, showing more of my higher level work, and do not use it as an image archiving resource. I do save my own scans on my hard-drive at home. It seems there is not a good location for the sort of ongoing gallery of prior work I would like to create. At least, expecting to have that kind of online memory storage for free is not likely.


I am hosting an ADVENTURE TIME Summer Swap 2014!

This swap is for artist trading cards of "Adventure Time" cartoon characters, and fans of the show know there are quite a few! Here is a great wiki of characters: adventuretime.wikia.com/wiki/C…  I think this is a group swap a lot of us can get into.

Here are the parameters of the swap for players:

Total of 6 hand-drawn and/or hand-painted artist trading cards. Please use only artist grade materials (no ballpoint pens, Sharpie markers, hi-lighters or other office supplies.) Good ideas for materials are artist markers, paint media, coloured pencils and inks. Make sure each ATC is made of heavy material like 140# or 300# watercolour paper, Bristol board, illustration board or is mounted on a thick core. People want a card, not a floppy piece of paper.

◙ Sign each card on the reverse with you name, your screen name and where you are from. Please include the name of the character on the back or in the title of the card. The main characters are easy but I won't claim I know every minor character... what are there, like thousands? ☺


◙ Player Total = 30! This swap will be closed if we hit that number of players. First come basis to join. Anyone who drops out, the remaining participants' work will be traded. Please respond below if you want to join this swap. I will send a Note for the mailing address. Please indicate if you are joining by June 20, 2014.

DEADLINE (MOVED BACK A MONTH!) for me to receive your ATCs will be July 25, 2014. Anything received after the deadline will be sent back. Please note: Chicago mail is slow as snails, and I recommend at least two weeks of travel time to be safe. Please use plastic sleeves to ship your ATCs to me.

USA players: please include $0.70 in stamps. International players: you can put in an extra ATC for hostess gift or PayPal $2.00 USD. I will make sure all trades will be mailed in plastic sleeves and send them using a large 5x8 inch (A7) envelope.


If there are any questions, please respond here or send me a Note. I will get to your inquiry as soon as I am able. Definitely feel free to show your work in the group gallery!

Adventure Time!


Peace, Love and Art from Chicago by Shellie Lewis, 14.8 x 21 cm, paper and object collage on recycled food box.




Lyubomyr Tymkiv is an artist seeking to hold a collage art gallery show in Lviv, Ukraine and he is requesting submissions to curate. The art needs to be donated because it is for a non-commercial event and not able to be mailed back to artists. The size needs to be 14.8 x 21 cm with an interest to “Show Your Vision” in collage and assemblage using “newspaper clippings, ribbons, bits of colored or handmade papers, other portions of artwork or texts, photographs or found objects glued to a piece of paper or canvas.” Per the host: “Only original art works are to be accepted.” Art needs to arrive before September 1, 2014.

I went through my paper scraps and magazine images and made this collage today.  I used a cereal box with YES! Paste bookbinding glue and some E6000 epoxy glue. I will be mailing this artwork soon. Please let other artists and members of the mail art community know about this wonderful event and that they are welcome to mail art to support this exhibition.









Original blog post you can forward to people is here: shellielewis.wordpress.com/201…  Please share with people in the artist trading card and mail art communities. Let's all help support this art show.

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